Father Elzear advanced with a slow step into the middle of the narrow passage which separated the two rows of benches on the galley.
He wore the habit of his order: a long white cassock, with a mantle of the same material caught up on the shoulders. A rope girded his loins, and notwithstanding the cold, his bare feet had no other protection than leather sandals. In the middle of his breast showed the coat of arms belonging to his order, an escutcheon diapered with gold and gules, surmounted with a silver cross.
Father Elzear resembled Raimond V. His features were noble and majestic, but the fatigues and austerities of his holy, self-abnegating profession had stamped upon them an expression of constant suffering.
The top of his head was shaven, and a crown of white hair encircled his venerable brow.
His pale, emaciated face, his hollow cheeks, made his soft, serene black eyes appear larger still, and a sweet, sad smile gave an expression of adorable benevolence to his countenance.
He stooped a little in walking, as if he had contracted this habit by bending over the chained captives. His weak wrists were marked with deep and ineffaceable scars. Captured in one of the numerous voyages he made from France to Barbary for the ransom of slaves, he had been put in chains, and so cruelly treated that he bore all his life the marks of the barbarity practised by pirates.
Having been ransomed by his own family, he voluntarily went into slavery again in order to take the place in an Algerian prison of a poor inhabitant of La Ciotat, who could not pay his ransom, and whom a dying mother called to France.
In forty years he had ransomed more than three thousand slaves, either with the money of his own patrimony, or with the fruit of his collections from other Christians.
With the exception of a few months passed, every two or three years, in the house of his brother Raimond V., Father Elzear, noble, rich, learned, with an independent fortune, which he had devoted to the ransom of slaves, had been travelling continually, either on land for the purpose of collecting alms, or on sea, on his way to deliver captives.
Sacredly vowed to this hard and pious mission, he had always refused the positions and rank that his birth, his virtues, his courage, and his angelic piety would have conferred upon him in his order.